1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic messaging and more particularly to processing meta-data for electronic messages in a messaging client.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic messaging represents the single most useful task accomplished over wide-scale computer communications networks. Some argue that in the absence of electronic messaging, the Internet would have amounted to little more than a science experiment. Today, electronic messaging seems to have replaced the ubiquitous telephone and fax machine for the most routine of interpersonal communications. As such, a variety of electronic messaging systems have arisen which range from real-time instant messaging systems and wireless text pagers to asynchronous electronic mail systems.
Electronic mail, a form of electronic messaging referred to in the art as e-mail, has proven to be the most widely used computing application globally. Though e-mail has been a commercial staple for several decades, due to the explosive popularity and global connectivity of the Internet, e-mail has become the preferred mode of communications, regardless of the geographic separation of communicating parties. Today, more e-mails are processed in a single hour than phone calls. Clearly, e-mail as a mode of communications has been postured to replace all other modes of communications, save for voice telephony.
Conventional e-mail clients provide functionality not only for composing new e-mails and reading received e-mails, but also for replying to a received e-mail and for forwarding a received e-mail. When replying to a received e-mail, one can reply only to the sender, or to the sender and all recipients. Notably, when replying to a received e-mail, the received e-mail will be stored in one folder—generally in the inbox, whereas the reply will be stored in a different folder—generally the sent mail folder. The only data linking the two e-mails ordinarily that is visible to the user will be a subject line for the e-mails. Notwithstanding, most conventional e-mail clients provide a visual cue adjacent to a received e-mail indicating that a reply has been processed for the received e-mail.
Conventional e-mail clients further provide a facility for automating a return receipt when a recipient opens an associated e-mail. The return receipt also can be in the form of an e-mail sent automatically on behalf of the recipient of the associated e-mail when opened. As in the case of a reply e-mail, in the return receipt context, the originally transmitted e-mail will be stored in the sent mail folder while the received return receipt e-mail will be stored in a separate folder. Again, the only linkage between the originally transmitted e-mail and the return receipt visible to the user will be the subject line. To the extent that the sender often omits a subject or often uses the same subject, it can be very difficult to locate a return receipt for a transmitted message and vice versa.